calling all Latinists

[swan_tower]

I seem to remember, back in high school, translating a poem by Horace where the first word (?) of the poem was a verb . . . but the subject of that verb was buried down in the second stanza. I don’t recall anything about its subject matter; it only stuck with me because it was the most egregious example I had personally encountered of how Latin can make an utter jigsaw of its word order.

But that poem doesn’t appear to be in our little booklet of Catullus and Horace, which means it was one of the ones the teacher gave us in a handout. And although I thought I still had those handouts, I can’t find them. So I turn to you, o Latinists of the internet: does this ring a bell? Can anybody point me at the poem in question?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[twistedchick]

I wish I could help you, but I don't own the book of Horace's poems that we translated when I was studying Latin. I don't suppose it was the one in which he coins the idea of the 'ship of state' that later poets reused?

[swan_tower]

Doesn't appear to be -- but in trying to find out, I discover that a) that metaphor originated with Plato, and b) there's at a professor who thinks reading that into Horace is the wrong interpretation! (I didn't click through on the search result to find out why.)

[sovay]

So I turn to you, o Latinists of the internet: does this ring a bell? Can anybody point me at the poem in question?

I am reminded of the third stanza (lines 9–12) in Odes 1.22 which pulls off a ridiculously delayed verb, but that's not what you were asking for:

namque me silva lupus in Sabina,
dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra
terminum curis vagor expeditis,
fugit inermem

I'll keep thinking.

[davidgoldfarb]

I thought about the same thing. There's also a very notable separation of (pro)noun me and adjective inermem. Unfortunately, I don't have a thorough grounding in Horace.

[swan_tower]

That is certainly an impressive example!

Part of me thinks "just go dig through his poems until you find it." The other part of me points out that's a lot of poems to dig through. I'm hoping someone recognizes the description . . . I can't swear the verb was the first word, but it was certainly very near the front.